


the things we'll never do

by rappaccini



Series: ut malum pluvia [6]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (offscreen birthday sex), Abuse, Angst, Character Death, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, F/M, M/M, Multi, Pseudo-Incest, Recovery, Saving the World, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26817466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: The Hargreeves siblings stop the apocalypse, one last time.(Or, an ending)
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves/Diego Hargreeves/Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves, Reginald Hargreeves & The Hargreeves, The Hargreeves & Lila Pitts, The Hargreeves Family
Series: ut malum pluvia [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857544
Comments: 30
Kudos: 56





	1. all i had to give

**Author's Note:**

  * For [light_loves_the_dark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/light_loves_the_dark/gifts).



Being alone with Reginald Hargreeves is the single greatest mistake Lila will ever make. It is also the last one. 

Not that she knows this yet, but she’s about to.

When Lila tells Reginald Hargreeves what is happening to her, she believes that she’s made the right choice, in coming to him. He invites her into his home without question, placing a hand on the middle of her back and guiding her up, up, up to his infirmary, where he immediately sets to work on finding a cure for her. 

Reginald Hargreeves spent the entirety of her lifetime, observing and experimenting with the powers of his charges, so when Lila presents herself to him, he is full of ideas, jotting down notes with a vibrancy she has not attributed to men of his age, looking at her with such hunger, hunger to understand how on earth she and this power of hers work. 

She is quite excited to have the entirety of his attention; she’s used to always coming second to something. Second to Vanya, second to Mother’s work, second to this or that, but not to him. Why, after today, being that the both of them are utterly alone, perhaps he might invite her to stay here, and to be his daughter. Perhaps in time, they will love each other; Lila has two mothers, so why not two fathers? Why not a new parent, one who won’t betray her as Mother had, or die on her as Ronnie-and-Anita had. One who might actually  _ help  _ her, instead of disappearing from her life too early, or turning her into a doll to be played with and cast aside. 

And he  _ will  _ help her. Of this, she is certain. She  _ is. _

“They’re in me still,” Lila says, swinging her legs back and forth on the operating chair, as he makes notes on her last food intake, “All of them. All of that power, and if we could find a way to surpass that…”

_ I could have them all, without being dependent on the others at all. They could finally be  _ mine, _ and when they are mine, then this pain will stop. _

“You could have them all, without limitation.” 

Lila frowns, wanting to point out that she doesn’t really care about limitations, but she still presents her arm for the needle, and allows him to draw her blood. 

The metallic grinding in her head simply won’t stop, and she must get rid of it. It doesn’t matter if there’s a knot in her gut, and a strange, worrisome quiver in her knees. This is her way up, and she shall take it, and Reginald Hargreeves is all she has. 

He decides to operate, to quite literally cut her open and see about how her innards work, as if she were a clock, running at the wrong time. 

Which, Lila supposes she is, in some ways. She has so many memories running in her head at the same time that she’s in a dozen places at once now, and is having a little trouble sorting out if she is in fact sitting on a flat leather chair, having her wrists restrained for safety purposes, or if she is lying in this very spot, four years ago, gasping and shaking, so shocked to be awake after spending years in a coma, so shocked to have such a strange and alien body attached to her head…

No, that’s not  _ her, _ is it?

Lila sighs, and grits her teeth. She looks at the restraints on her elbows and ankles, and across her middle, and looks to the ones on her wrists, still being applied.

“Tighter,” she says. 

He obliges, and Lila feels strange. She had told him to do it, and he did it, and she should be pleased that she was listened to, but a part of her wonders if maybe she shouldn’t have. If maybe she shouldn’t be on this table, so early. If maybe they need to spend more time, figuring out what it is that is even wrong, before they set to cutting her open like a pig fetus in a biology laboratory. 

He takes out the anesthesia, and she’s not so sure this is a good idea anymore. 

Lila doesn’t feel the kind of minor anxiety people feel when they undergo worrisome but necessary medical procedures. She feels the way she did when Mother gave her her eighteenth birthday present, in the form of her pre-hiring augmentation. She feels like a small insect that’s been caught in the web of a spider, wondering, irrationally, if it would be worse to stay still in the hopes that he might forget about her, and go hunting more interesting prey, or begin screaming and thrashing and trying to break away…

_ No, _ she thinks.  _ No, that’s absurd. Mother was the spider, not him. He is a man of science who’s spent years studying these powers that are trapped inside me. If anyone can help me, it is him.  _

But her legs are twitching, and her whole body is alive and fizzling with agitation. It knows something that she does not. Or maybe it’s just in pain, and has been in pain for so long that it can do nothing other than send out distress signals that mean nothing at all. 

_ They are not the same,  _ she tells herself, ravenously inhaling air, as if a ten-ton weight is being pressed onto her chest.  _ He and Mother are not the same. See? I’m going to fall asleep, and I’m going to wake up, and everything’s going to be better.  _

“I will begin shortly,” he says. “Are you ready?” There’s something in the tone of his voice, that tells her that even if she weren’t, he wouldn’t care much. 

“Okay,” she says, the word squeezing out of her far more hesitant than she’d wanted it to.

He places the anesthesia mask over her mouth, and as her mind dissolves, he begins in earnest. 

It doesn’t go well.

* * *

The heeled hiking boots Grace and Pogo had spent the better part of the afternoon hunting down are, to Grace’s infinite disappointment, not actually structurally sound enough to survive a trek across many miles of rough wilderness, and only look as though they do for the sake of aesthetics. When they reach the home Grace has maintained in her other body for the past twenty-nine years, she steps onto the threshold in the pointed black heels she’d been hoping to avoid using, for fear of snapping them, and she has sullied the velvet skirt of her dress with mud and grass stains. 

This is not important in that Grace is in pain, as being a robot, she is immune to the discomforts that plague women forced to wear three-inch heels for hours on end. This is important in that she thinks it important to look good, when she meets her children as her new self.

When Grace had reset herself, much had changed, you see, but the love had stayed. She had kept it, finding it far too important to part with.

She has to tell them. Before she begins her new life, whatever it ends up being, she has to tell them who she is now, who she’s become. 

Pogo, she isn’t sure about. He doesn’t owe the children the same explanation she does. 

Dawn is spreading across the sky, but it is still shaded and dim here, as the bunker is caught in the twilight of the mountainside’s colossal shadow. So no one sees them when they ascend. 

No one, it seems, but the dog. Grace stares in vague confusion at the puppy, growling with his teeth shredding at the hem of her skirt. She doesn’t remember  _ him. _

A part of her worries that they’d arrived too late, that her children have already left. That the lights shining are not an indicator of activity, but were simply left on by mistake or through some act of carelessness. 

But no, there is Vanya, poking her head out from around the corner, with Ben by her side. 

“I’m so glad to see we haven’t missed you,” Grace says, feeling a little pleased at the way their faces light up, and they rush to take her into their arms.

Then, Vanya sees Pogo, and her face crumples with tears. She drops to her knees, and winds her arms tightly around him, whispering something that Grace’s auditory sensors are not strong enough to make out, but that she roughly distinguishes as _ I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. _

This makes no sense to Grace, who is being caught into a tight embrace by Klaus and Allison, who’ve come racing around the corner in answer to Ben’s cry that she and Pogo have arrived.

Whatever it means, Luther seems to understand. Rather than embracing her, as she had expected, he gives her a polite nod, then goes to place an enormous, gentle hand on Vanya’s shoulders, to guide her away from Pogo. 

Ben is looking at her strangely. He can’t help but wonder as to her intentions; he’s never quite trusted her the way Diego had, always been keenly aware of her circuitry, and the hidden price to engaging with her. 

But this… this is something  _ else. _ He’s never seen her dress like this before, or wear her hair down, or use a voice this deep. He certainly hasn’t expected to see her outside the house. 

“What does this mean?” he asks, when she’s broken away from Allison and Klaus, to speak with him again. “The both of you being here, I mean.”

“Well, we’re not associating with your father any longer,” Grace explains. “We were hoping that you wouldn’t mind us tagging along, at least for a little while.”

“Oh. Well, glad to have you,” Ben says. “So who got us in the divorce?”

“Divorce,” Grace repeats woodenly. “There was no divorce. There was no marriage.”

“Never mind. Just a joke. Forget it.”

“Oh. Thank you. I apologize; things do tend to slip past me sometimes.”

“It’s alright,” Ben says. “Hey, you want to sit down?” 

Grace glances around, at her children, crowded around Pogo, counting One, Three, Four, Seven… “Where are Five and Diego?”

“Oh, they’re over there. Kitchen.”

“Then I will say hello to them first,” she decides. She will leave him with Pogo for a while, and seeing as how he's smiling in a way that Grace has genuinely never seen before, she's fairly certain he wouldn't mind an extra set of eyes on him. 

Grace makes her way to the kitchen, pausing in the entryway when she hears Diego raise his voice. The two are so engrossed in a conversation that Grace would feel bad if she were to interrupt them. If she listens for a moment, she will gain valuable context that could only serve to help her. 

“Are you sure about that?” Diego’s snapping, presumably at Five. 

The discussion gets muffled for a moment, too much nonsensical noise for her processors to divine meaning from, but then, the keyword  _ Lila. _

Grace recalls her. The newest of her daughters, who’d appeared out of the aether and helped Vanya cut down the family by half. She’s had so little time to get to know the girl; she only has a few precious hours of footage and audio of her, before she’d gone and vanished. There’s only her arrival in Norway, and her brief appearance in the mansion hallway. Despite this, and despite what Lila had done in those hours, she still loves her equally to the others. 

“How would we know where to find her?” Five is saying. “She could literally be anywhere in the  _ world, _ Diego.”

“Why,” Grace says, “She’s with your father.”

* * *

Something has gone wrong.

Lila has awakened, not to peace, but to pain. To her body, screaming in protest, as freezing gusts of static spread through her limbs, rendering them heavy and stiff as lead. She can feel gummy threads of sinew suddenly turning brittle and rigid, her body limp and unresponsive to her commands for it to  _ move, _ not because it is still asleep, but because it is stiff and rotten as dead flesh.

Something has gone wrong, and he won’t tell her what.

“What happened? What’s happening?”

He has his back to her, is pouring over his notes in confusion. 

And her heart is pounding in her chest, loud enough to make her bones shiver and her hair stand on end and her skin quiver like a living thing that’s going to peel itself off of Lila’s back and go scuttling away out the window.

The window. The glass has broken from it. Why is it broken? It hadn’t been broken when she’d gone under. 

The light is broken too. The bulb’s been shattered so where is the bright blue-white light in the infirmary  _ coming from? _

“Tell me right now--”

Reginald wheels around, and suddenly his stern face is hovering in front of hers, painted a strange, luminous shade of blue-white, almost like…

Like the light is coming from her.

Lila feels her gut clench.

“Stop this right now,” he growls, but Lila can hardly hear him. Her heart is roaring in her ears, so loud she can hardly hear anything else. 

Lila tries. She reaches down, deep into herself, where her power lies, to cut it off, to force it to stop, but… she can’t… she can’t turn it off. It just won’t listen to her. 

“I can’t,” she says.

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“I  _ said _ I  _ can’t!” _ Lila snaps. 

She watches Reginald’s eyes widen. 

He had lied, you see, when he’d said he wanted only to perform an exploratory operation.

In reality, he’d done something entirely different. 

You see, Lila is the only student he has now, and seeing as how all his others imploded in rebellion, he has to ensure that she will not follow suit. That, if she were to lose control, or to disappear on him, he’d have a way to neutralize her power permanently. 

Sir Reginald Hargreeves had been an adherent to the teachings of Pavlov. He had taken great interest in the fellow's scientific discoveries, and had always wanted to replicate them on his own. Now, with Lila, he has the perfect opportunity to ensure her complete compliance, and the total control of her powers. Pavlov made his dogs salivate, and Hargreeves would, in turn, make his own charge seize up in pain. 

Simply put, he  had attached a small device to the inside of her body, designed to emit a minor electric shock every time she used her power. That is, it only would once he’d switched it on. 

He’d only done it once. 

Only once, to make sure that it worked. 

And it had. It had worked so well that whatever power is possessing Lila had caught the shock and amplified it, coursing through her muscles and making her internal organs writhe. It’s her own fault, really; she should have  _ told  _ him that her body would react this way…

But simply put, she’d sustained so much internal damage that he expects she will die in a few short hours from heart failure. 

She’s going to die. Lila’s going to die, and when she does, with all this  _ power  _ building within her, growing and growing with no way to release it safely… well, it'll be something to the effect of the detonation of a nuclear time bomb. 

Lila doesn’t know this, so much as she _feels_ it.  She feels something strange and unnatural lodged somewhere in her chest cavity, something that had distinctly not been there before. She feels the stiffness of her limbs, the deep, roaring ache of her body in a way that is new and terrible. She feels the power, building and building in her, a deep well that is about to overflow, churned on by the beating of her heart.

“What did you  _ do?” _ Lila shrieks.

And stares, as a volley of terrible blue-white energy comes roaring from her mouth, blasting right into him. 

He falls to his knees, roaring in agony, tearing at his skin until it ripples and stretches away in his hands, no more substantive than rubber. 

Then, he’s on his feet, limping out the door and leaving it to swing shut behind him. 

And Lila is alone, with no idea what to do. She is alone,  with this power that keeps building, and building, and  _ building  _ in her, with nowhere to let it go but out. 

* * *

It’s on the news.

Clouds, dark as soot, shot through with an otherworldly bluish light, blanketing the city they grew up in, the words  _ mandatory evacuation  _ and  _ mass blackout _ and  _ accident  _ leaping out of the television and stirring up their worst fears, jangling in their heads like a pocketful of coins. 

Something is happening. Something massive. 

And, seeing as the clouds have their epicenter directly over Midtown, directly over the strip of city blocks where their childhood home is located, they’re pretty sure they know who it is that has caused this. 

“What the fuck did Dad just do?” Ben grumbles. 

“Language, son,” Pogo corrects.

“Sorry. What the  _ frick  _ did Dad just do?”

“Something bad,” Luther says, turning to Pogo. “Do you know what could be causing this. Pogo, is that why you left?”

Pogo looks up at him, shaking his head. “No, the circumstances of our departure had nothing to do with anything but our own decisions to do so.” 

“But you must’ve seen something, something that explains  _ this.” _

“It looks…” Allison trails off, tilting her head in thought.

Familiar.

It looks  _ familiar. _

Allison is experiencing an immensely intense sense of deja vu. Her mouth prickles with a strange sensation, like burning pins are pressing into the insides of his lips, and…  “That was what the sky looked like, when Vanya… When we were all at the Icarus.”

Everyone looks to Vanya, as if in doing so, they’d realize that she was not there at all, and had somehow blinked across the world. She simply stares back, shaking her head helplessly. “I don’t… I...”

“So Dad’s pulling a Vanya?” Klaus asks.

Allison glares at him. 

“What? Is it still too soon?”

“Whatever,” Allison huffs, throwing up a hand. “I don’t know, but I’m just saying that it looks the same. That’s not a coincidence.” 

“Definitely not,” says Ben. “You don’t think that means that it’s… that it’s happening  _ again, _ do you?”

_ It, _ of course, being the apocalypse.

“It can’t be,” Vanya breathes. “No one can do that but me, and…”

And, one other person. One other person, who’s up and vanished, who’s still out there somewhere. 

“Oh no,” she says. 

The door to the kitchen slams open. 

The crowd of people gathered around the tiny television turn, to see him and Diego racing in from the kitchen, their eyes wild and faces ghost-white. 

“Lila’s with Dad,” Diego says. “She’s--”

He lays eyes on the television. 

“Fuck,” he breathes.

“Wait,” Klaus says. “It’s  _ her? She’s _ doing this? How? She can’t do that without being close to us.”

“She can,” says Five, as grim as though he’d just watched the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb flare up on the horizon. “Dad did something to her.”

Ben curses under his breath. That’s where she’d gone; she’d gone to their father, and he’d gone playing with fire, and now they’re all about to burn for it. 

“So…” Luther trails off, looking to Vanya. She should know what’s about to happen best of any of them, so if there’s a chance this is nothing, if they’ll all be fine...

“We have to go home,” she says. “We have to go stop her, otherwise that’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“What happened before, with the apocalypse. It’ll happen again.” 

The family takes the news numbly, like a pack of soldiers who’d thought the war was over, only to be told they had yet another battle on the horizon.

Luther almost wants to laugh. And here, he was thinking that the family wouldn’t have to save the world anymore. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s go. I’ll get the ship running.”

They fall back into the old habit of preparing for a mission, and for the first time, the entirety of the Umbrella Academy falls into the frantic few minutes before their dispatch, and not a single sibling is left waiting in the wings. 

They suit up. So to speak. There are no uniforms any longer, just scraps of dark clothing that they all throw together. Coats are pulled over backs and gloves over hands, even though it’s the middle of summer, and it’s really more for aesthetic than the purpose they float back and forth to each other,  _ coverage. _

Luther preps the Minerva, as Klaus and Ben get into a tense, pre-mission-jitter-fueled argument over who gets to use the bathroom after Vanya, and Diego stares at the television, wondering what on earth had happened.

Allison is talking to Grace and Pogo, holding their hands tightly as she urges them to stay put, to remain here, and await their return. She does not entertain the possibility that they will not.

_ We will, _ she thinks firmly.  _ We will. _

Five, however, does. There is a very high probability that they shall die in a few hours, and therefore, Five decides to entrust Mr. Pennycrumb to Grace and Pogo for safekeeping. He leaves the puppy with Grace, and a very strict set of instructions: the length of his daily walks, the velocity at which he prefers his balls to be thrown, the complex training regimen he has the puppy under in order to ensure exceptional behavior, which objects are acceptable to chew on, which sweater he is to wear on which day of the week, “and remember, he only eats wet food. None of that bottom-shelf shit.”

Grace, who has memorized all of his specifications, agrees, and privately decides to amend the puppy’s diet as soon as Five has left. 

Five looks at Mr. Pennycrumb’s doughy little face, and scratches his ears affectionately. “Be good, alright? I’ll be very upset if you’re not.”

Mr. Pennycrumb, who isn’t capable of the cognition necessary to understand more than the word ‘good’ from the sentence his master has just given him, simply wiggles his stumpy little tail, and licks Five’s fingers. Five interprets this as a promise. 

Then, Five climbs into the Minerva, takes his seat between Vanya and Diego, and they’re gone.

* * *

The Minerva is the single greatest innovation in space travel that the planet on which she was built had conceived, and is certainly still the greatest craft on the planet she had come to call home. She is equipped with a quantic battery that can last four hundred years of earth-only travel, and decades of deep-space voyaging. She has survived thirty years of zero maintenance, gathering rust in a leaky shed on a mountainside. She has survived the death of a planet, of a species, of a civilization. The Minerva has not once failed, not in the hundred years she’d been operational.

Were it not for this day, she might have survived another. 

Instead of sailing through the thick black band of clouds that has descended over their city, she bumps and pitches and rolls, like a lifeboat in the midst of a squall, tossing her seven passengers to and fro. They are spared only by their seatbelts, and by their foresight to eat nothing before this mission. 

Instead of descending with grace, she shudders once, as her engine freezes up under the influence of the shivering electrical thrum that has overtaken the city limits.

She shudders, sputters, and falls.

“What’s happening?!” Vanya cries, “What’s happening?!”

Luther, at the controls, stares helplessly as they spark threateningly, then flicker out. “It’s dead! I can’t help us!”

“Why?” shrieks Allison, whose braids whip Diego in the face like a cat-o’nine-tails, like they have a mind of their own, and that mind is fixed on finishing the job and truly blind him completely. 

“I don’t know, you think it’s  _ her?” _

“Oh, I dunno, Luther,” Diego yells, “Why don’t you open the door and ask?” 

“Ah, fuck me!” Klaus hisses, watching Ben’s face turn purple, and knowing that if he’d eaten so much as a crumb, he would be coughing it into Klaus’s lap. 

Seven shrieks rise into a hideous chorus, and in the middle of it all, there is Five, screaming,  _ “Grab onto me!” _

Their hands reach, and find his outstretched arms, his grasping hands. 

In a searing blue flash of solar energy, they slam into the grass of Morrison Park, landing in a grunting pile of squirming, newly-bruised limbs and black fabric. But landing alive.

A split second later, the Minerva comes crunching into the street, collapsing like a soda can in a musical crash.

“Shit,” Five breathes, patting himself down, checking for breaks. Finding none, he twists and crawls out from the rest of his family, who are detangling themselves in a hurry. Diego in particular stares warily at Vanya’s violin case, which she had grabbed in the second before the fall, which had nearly beheaded him, as if it might come to life and try again.

They stumble to their feet, some able to maintain a certain amount of grace when they stand, like Diego and Allison, some swaying into each other, like Ben and Vanya. But they are standing, all seven of them. They are standing, and they are aching from the impact, but they are all alive and mostly unharmed.

It’s dark. 

It’s not even three in the afternoon on the last day of July, yet it is cold enough for each of the Hargreeves to pull their respective jacket closer around their shoulders, and the sky is black as midnight, roiling like the sea in the midst of the greatest storm in a century. The siblings are below it directly, and they look up at the smoke-and-silver rumble, shot through with flickers of pale blue lightning skating across the sky, as if they are a crew of deep-sea divers, planted on the ocean’s floor and peering up as a typhoon takes hold of the sea above them. 

The chilled air is heavy and damp, with the shivering energy the column of air that will host a lightning strike takes on, shortly before the electricity makes its tumbling, brilliant descent. It makes the hair on the backs of their necks stand on end, makes them want to pick up their feet and  _ run. _

“You think it’s gonna rain?” asks Ben.

“Good thing the Umbrellas are here,” says Diego, who sincerely believes it is a good line, has secretly been thinking about applying it to such a situation for years now, and is rather pleased with himself for  _ finally  _ being able to use it. Luther thinks it’s clever. The rest of the family decides to humor him, and pretends, rather unconvincingly, that they agree. 

All around them is the sort of darkness that they’ve only experienced in the depths of the wild, the sort of darkness that doesn’t-- that  _ shouldn’t--  _ penetrate to the core of a city. The entire city has lost power, and the streets are coated with shattered glass, stretched out to the siblings and shining faintly in the moonish glow of the clouds, like a path of jagged stars. 

And the sound. The irregular thrumming in the clouds, pulsing down to make the ground tremble and quake, to make the buildings themselves shiver like they’ve been caught naked in a blizzard. It’s a terrible song, one that sinks into their bones and makes their teeth rattle, and...

It isn’t a song, Vanya realizes, “It’s a  _ heartbeat.” _

It’s a heartbeat, and as the siblings walk, navigating the spots on the street that aren’t coated in glass, as if they’re playing a nightmarish game of hopscotch, Vanya distinguishes that the beating of this strange, cosmic heart, of  _ Lila’s  _ heart, is growing fainter.

Yes, as they are walking, these rippling pulses of cloud matter above their heads are coming slower and slower, the shaking of the earth beneath them is happening less and less, and the beating of her heart is growing  _ fainter. _

“She’s dying,” Vanya says. 

“Is… is that a good thing?” Klaus asks, feeling as though the heavens might open and impale him upon a spear of lightning for daring to speak at all. “I mean… Wouldn’t that save us? It means this’ll all be over soon, right? She can’t destroy the world if she’s dead.”

“No,” Vanya says. She remembers the first time she had given herself to the power that is causing this damage. She remembers pausing in her song, and feeling it build and build in her, preparing for a horrible crescendo. She remembers the heavy cost of burying all that feeling deep within her, only to have it burst out all at once. “No, it’s not.” 

Lila is going to die, and when she does, she’ll release enough power to kill the world. 

Vanya tells them as much, and watches the blood drain from her family’s faces.

“So how do we solve this?” Five prompts.

“I don’t know,” Vanya answers honestly. "I just don't know."

"We'll figure it out," Luther assures them. "Somehow." 

They walk, and learn through trial and error, how to navigate the pulses of percussive energy that beat at them in walls, sending them skidding backwards, or knocking them to their rears. They learn to move in the spaces between the heartbeats, to shrink down and cling to each other as the latest wave rolls over them, and they make good time. 

They find themselves all alone. Not a single person is out on the streets, or hanging out a window to watch, or driving in a panic to escape. Perhaps the people are all out on the clogged highways they’d flown over, which are packed bumper-to-bumper for miles upon miles, and have streams of people threading through them all, making the journey on foot or bike or, in one admittedly amusing case that lightened their otherwise grim mood for a minute, stolen-policehorseback. 

_ Or maybe they’re still here, _ Diego thinks,  _ all hiding in their basements.  _

Whatever the case, it will not matter if they fail. Five has told them of the charred world, of how deep the burns had scoured. There is nowhere on the surface of the planet that will survive, if what is about to happen does occur. 

So. They have to stop it. Somehow. 

“Jesus Christ,” Allison says, to no one in particular. 

Death hangs over them all, following the seven siblings as they walk, stepping into their shoe prints like an old friend. It hasn’t determined yet who it is following in particular, if it is following any of them at all, or is just making its walk at their side, as it has so many times before. Whatever the case, it is content to make the journey, and they are all keenly aware of its presence. 

“Hey,” Ben says. “We’re here.”

They’ve come to the street upon which their childhood home resides, and they can see lances of blue-white light, bright as stripes of fire, striping out from the distant windows, blazing bright paths across the street. 

They are here again, approaching a grand old building, looming over them like an ancient castle with its halls thick with monsters, or perhaps it is a monster in its own right, for if one were to look at the brick and mortar of its walls, as they expand and retract with a steady, strained movement, one would discern that it is  _ breathing, _ like a terminal patient taking their last gasps might breathe. A breeze that is not a breeze at all spills through the shattered windows, playing with their hair and touching their faces curiously. 

It is breathing, and as the siblings get close enough to realize that the strange, mirrorlike shine to the street in front of it is due to the water rolling down from windows and doors and squeezing out from between bricks, the casualty of dozens of pipes bursting, they realize that it is bleeding as well. 

_ We’ve been here before, _ Allison thinks, and she knows with certainty that Five is of a like mind with her. We’ve been here, months ago, in another world, and the only thing that has changed is the location.  _ It is not the Icarus that is about to burst, but our own home. We’ve been here before, I’ve seen this movie, and I already know the ending. _

She imagines it: the Earth, seared into a cinder, or shattered by its meeting with the Moon.

“We’ve been here before,” she whispers, but somehow each of her siblings can hear her perfectly. Her heart is jackhammering in her chest and she feels like she’s going to scream, to cry, to rip off the black leather of her gloves and rake at the skin of her face with her nails, because they’re here, on the edge of the world, looking down into…

“No,” Luther says. His fingers lace through hers, and she feels her terrified heart settle, like a songbird settling back into its nest. She squeezes so tightly that if he were not as strong as he is, she’d be certain she’d be crushing him. “No we haven’t. This time, Vanya is with us, and we are all together. And because we are together, we will win.” 

Klaus looks at him, and that cynical part of him that the house had fed for years and years wants to crow out,  _ you liar, we’re all going to die. _

Instead, he reaches out, and curls his arms around Ben and Diego, drawing them closer to his sides. Ever physical, he is always reaching with long, slender limbs out to grasp at anything and everything, but this is different. This time, he needs them to hold him up, and he intends to do the same to them.

Luther’s words take effect, lifting heads, drawing shoulders up, straightening spines. They can do this. They are together, and they are seven to one. They are together, one living, breathing organism united by one purpose and one sense of absolute trust in one another, and they will not fail. 

“Are we ready?” Luther asks, looking down the line, to Allison, to Diego and Klaus and Ben, to Vanya, and to Five, all the way at the end.

They all look to him, their faces catching the blue light and glowing like strange moons. Six nods, six gazes steeling with the look that only soldiers such as they gain, before they walk into a war zone. 

“Then let’s go.” 

The Hargreeves siblings enter the maw of their home in twos and threes, ascending the stone steps and passing the mossy-veiled lions, still crouched and guarding, even though they’ve failed utterly in their duties.  Allison and Luther head in first, a deathly calm settling over them, which they welcome. It is a familiar feeling, one they’ve felt possess them a hundred times before, and they’ll need it to keep their heads high, to keep the people behind them from panicking.  Then, Diego and Ben, with Klaus weaseled in between them. All drawn tense as a string, all determined not to show it, determined to see it through, whatever _it_ ends up being.  Five and Vanya are the last to enter, not in the least bit because Vanya reaches out, and her small, rough hand catches on Five’s wrist, just before he jumps into line.

“Hey,” she says, an odd tenseness laced through her tone, “Five?”

He turns, regarding her carefully. “What is it?” 

Vanya’s looking at him, shining white as lightning in the harsh pale light, almost like it’s hers again, and not someone else’s. “If something happens--”

“Nothing’s going to happen. We’re going to be fine.”

“Yes,” she says, “But. If something happens…” She takes a step to him, reaching up to catch his hand in hers, “I want you to have something, alright?”

“Okay,” Five says, feeling his breath catch. She’s so close now, so...

Vanya leans up, and kisses him. It’s quick and light, like the brush of a butterfly’s wing, but it leaves him with the rolling, full-body sensation that one experiences after having become the victim of a lightning strike. His head bobs after her, when she pulls away. 

For a moment, he seriously wonders if he’s alright with dying, then he shakes it off. He wants to live. He wants more of what she’s just promised him. He has his whole second lifetime ahead of him, and he knows what he wants to fill it with. 

"Let's go," she says, and he follows her lead.

Five and Vanya follow last of all, walking hand in hand, into the dark. 

* * *

Inside, it’s quiet and cold as a charnel house.

The light is coming from upstairs, waving across the ceiling in shuddering blue lines, shattered through the crystal of the chandelier and scattering a million tiny fractals of light down on them. There’s an inch of water rippling across the floor from the burst pipes, and they can see their shadows, inky blue in the mirrored surface of the water, staring up at them. 

“Where is she?” Diego whispers, unsure why he’s keeping his voice down. 

Vanya sets her violin case down on the little end table by the coatroom, and draws her instrument out. It gleams, bright as the moon, in the strange, wavering light. She looks up, reaches out with her senses, and listens to the creaking and moaning of the walls and ceilings, to the musical sway of the chandelier as it rocks back and forth, sending crystals showering down like hail onto the checkerboard floor. 

“Above us. Not too far. Second floor, I think.” 

They wait for the next rumbling pulse to pass before they dare ascend the stairs, and it’s the right impulse. The chandelier pitches ominously, and showers of dust rain down on their heads. There’s a stiff, wooden crash above them, one of their paintings dropping off the wall and breaking against the floor. 

When it’s passed, they untangle from Luther, and race up the steps, their feet pounding thunderously, enough to make the paintings that haven’t yet fallen from the walls quiver in fear of them. 

They’re getting closer, feeling the feverish chill of the air seep into their skin and make the underside of it prickle, almost painfully, as a hideous rhythm pounds on the inside of their hearts, whispering  _ you were born for this, you were born for this, you were born for this, _ and--

“Wait,” hisses Vanya, reaching up to snatch Diego by the back of his harness. 

He skids to a halt, the family crashing in behind him. 

Diego draws out a knife, using the mirrored surface of its side to peek around the corner. He draws in a sharp gasp, and takes off running, the family following behind him.

They see what he’s looking at immediately: a hunk of molten rubber in the middle of the hall, the color of old skin, bubbling and stuck to the floor. It’s  _ odd  _ in a way they can’t put their fingers on, making them feel viscerally uncomfortable, but not in a way any of them can make sense of.

At least, until Ben sees the gaping eye holes, and the sharp gray brow. 

It’s their father. 

Or rather, it’s their father’s skin.

The man himself, if one could even call him that, is slouched on the floor, nestled in the shadowed corner of the hallway, using the walls to prop himself up. The stench of scorched flesh assaults their senses, provoking chokes and stifled gags, as they all reach up to cover their noses with their hands. Even after everything he’s seen, it’s enough to make Five nearly keel over and vomit. 

Their father is horrifically burned, his arms and chest blackened and skeletal, his fine dark suit scoured away, all his flesh red and pink and bubbling like raw meat. 

Vanya listens to the skittish thump of his heart, and looks up to Luther, a dozen warring emotions flashing across her face. “He’s… not going to make it.” 

She isn’t sure why she’s so numb when she says it. She should be laughing and whooping, and throwing herself into Klaus’s arms to let him twirl her around. She should be popping open a bottle of champagne and letting Allison pour it into her mouth. She should be obnoxiously happy.

Instead, she feels nothing at all. 

When Vanya looks at her family, she finds that her sentiment is not an outlier. 

They walk towards him, as though drawn in by the effects of a spell. 

The blue-white brilliance emanating from down the hallway has somehow made the shadows even inkier, like concentrated chunks of darkness. In that darkness, their father has dragged himself to rest, and they can only make out the silhouette of him, before they have to venture closer.

Now unmasked, they see him for exactly what he is, for everything he had hidden from them for their entire lives.

He is small and frail and utterly unremarkable.

And that is all.

Their father gasps so hard his breath sounds like tearing flesh, gripping his charred chest with a clawed hand, his eyes bulging from their sockets. His monocle hangs from his tattered jacket, a circle of gold with all the glass shattered away. Ribbons of light rake across his strange face, and he stares at them uncertainly, as if he can’t quite believe they’re here.

“What happened?” Allison asks.

“She did this,” Reginald wheezes, not even bothering to clarify. He doesn’t really need to. They can all guess who it is he’s referring to.  _ “She _ did this. She came to me and then she turned on me, I was helping her--”

“No you weren’t,” Luther interjects coldly, thinking of the last time his father had  _ helped  _ him, realizing why exactly the light is coming from the  _ infirmary  _ of all places. 

_ So, _ he thinks.  _ That’s what happened.  _

“You did this,” Luther says. “All of this is  _ you, _ not her.”

“Grace,” their father croaks. “Where is she? Where is Pogo? I'll need, I’ll…” He coughs, spraying the siblings with red-tinted phlegm. 

“They’re in Norway,” says Ben, “Or did you not notice?”

He hadn’t. He honestly hadn’t noticed at all. 

Reginald’s strange lips move, shaping the word  _ Norway, _ as the wheels in his mind turn. He’d thought himself doomed, but if his children had arrived from there, then…

“Do you have it?” he hisses, his voice high and sharp. “The ship, do you have it?”

_ The Minerva, _ Allison recognizes. Which means… “You want to  _ leave?” _

He glares up at her, his single buggish eye catching the blue light in its pupil and glowing wolfishly. The other one has burst, and is leaking down his cheek in a horrible runny manner. “The world is lost,” he says. “There is simply no saving a lost cause. One must simply cut their losses, and seek out something new.”

“No, no  _ way,” _ Five scoffs. “You don’t get to fuck it up and then just  _ move on.” _

“It was inevitable,” Reginald wheezes. “The apocalypse was coming. I  _ had  _ to stop it--”

“No,” A long hiss leaves Five’s mouth through gritted teeth. “No it wasn’t. Not until you made it that way.” 

“I did no such thing,” he says, a strange high whistling caught somewhere in his windpipe. “I did everything I could to keep the world safe.”

For all their childhoods, they’d heard their father rave about the end of the world. He’d kept insisting upon it, over and over. It was coming today,  _ no, _ tomorrow,  _ no, _ the day after that,  _ no, _ the week later, on and on, ad infinitum. The end was always nigh, always coming around the corner with its high beams on, so they’d better listen, they’d better stay, they’d better do what he says. 

“No you didn’t,” says Vanya. “That wasn’t why you did it. You don’t care about the world; you never did. You were just scared.” 

“Besides,” Klaus grins rakishly, “We totaled that old tin can on the way in. Happy accident, I guess.” 

“No,” insists Reginald. “You  _ didn’t. _ You’re here for  _ me.” _ Even at the end of the world, it seems that Reginald Hargreeves is incapable of not making himself the center of everything. He is creating for himself, in the feverish swells of his mind, a world in which his children have forgiven him for what he’s done, have come to him to sweep him off into their arms and fix him, where they will never leave him or question him again. He has given himself over to delusion, because in that delusion, he might be able to die thinking himself vindicated.

“We’re not,” says Diego. “We’re here in spite of you. We’re here for her.” 

“Her?” Reginald’s one eye looks beyond them, to the white beam shining from the bottom of the door to the infirmary. 

“We’re here to save her.”

“Save her? Number Two, are you an  _ idiot? _ That girl is a lost cause. I should have known it when she’d come to me. It’s a wasted effort.” 

Diego scoffs. He’s heard that before, he’s said it to  _ himself  _ over and over.  _ Look at how true it had turned out,  _ he wants to say.  _ Mom’s alive, and she’s herself again, and Vanya’s here, standing right with us, and she was fine, and she figured herself out, and all she ever needed was time. _

Lila deserves the same. There is no reason at all why she doesn’t. 

“We have to try,” he says. They  _ have  _ to, not just for the sake of the world, but for the sake of the person that is Lila herself. And even if she cannot be saved, if the world truly is doomed, they must try even harder.

The house shivers and shudders, deep cracks writing themselves across the ceiling and crawling down the hall towards them, reaching towards their father with strange, witchlike fingers. 

“Let’s go,” insists Ben, and the Hargreeves siblings turn away from their father, turn themselves towards the apocalypse. They begin to break away, one by one. Already, they are preparing to claw at the wall and crawl across the floor, to survive the weakening pulses of energy that rolls through their bodies like an electrical outage, sparking their nerves to light and washing over them, head to toe. 

Luther is the last to step aside. His father is so close to death now, and having missed it in the first time around, he has decided it will not be so this time.  He looks at this man, who sacrificed each and every one of their childhoods on a pyre, giving them up to the gods in return for the safety of the world, only to cause that which he had been trying to prevent. 

“It was all for nothing,” Luther says. “Everything you’ve done to us. It meant nothing. But we’re going to live through this, and we’re going to forget about you. And you know something?  _ I can’t wait.”  _

It’s the last thing Reginald Hargreeves ever hears. He gasps and trembles violently for a moment longer, before his breaths stop short in his chest. Unlike his counterpart in the world that no longer exists, he dies surrounded by his family. Somehow, he’s still alone. 

Allison’s hand curls around Luther’s shoulder, and tugs him back, towards the family, towards the light. He doesn’t look back once. 

* * *

Inside the infirmary, the world-killer is waiting for them. Lila Pitts is still in the medical chair in which she’d been strapped for her procedure, but she is no longer restrained; she has burned everything tying her down to cinders. She cannot move, but to turn her heavy, heavy head, to look at the door as it shatters into a storm of splinters and floats in a cloud down the hall, to watch the cluster of dark-clad forms all clinging to each other, and vanishing in the blink of an eye. 

When she closes her heavy, heavy eyes and opens them again, she finds she is not alone in the room any longer. The Hargreeves siblings have arrived, all in black, all grim and determined and… here to kill her. 

Even a day ago, Lila might’ve screamed and thrashed and fought. She might’ve dropped the whole of the world on their heads, to drag them down to hell with her, to know that if she might die, at least they won’t get the satisfaction of having done it themselves.

But now…

Now, she’s just tired. Every part of her is on fire, and she is burning up from the inside. Every part of her has burned; her blood has boiled, her bones are charcoal, her skin cracked and crumbling away. Her anger has been scoured away, and her fear, and there is nothing left but this pain. In trying to rid herself of it, she’s only made it so much larger, so colossal that it’s great enough to swallow the world whole. 

She is glowing, bright as molten iron, blue as the heart of a newborn star, and the Academy are regarding her with their eyes screwed into slits. 

Lila closes her eyes, and sighs.  _ Get on with it, _ she thinks. She doesn’t particularly want to die, but she wants it to be over. 

The Hargreeves siblings are trying to get close to her, to reach her, but the white waves of energy are pinning them down. Only Luther is strong enough to stand upright; the others are hunched over, like wolves with their hackles raised. 

They take deep, heavy steps, as though they are all clad in heavy divers’ suits and are attempting to race across the abyss at the bottom of the ocean, despite the weight of the world on their shoulders. 

Of all of them, Allison, moving with liquid grace, is the first to reach her.

She stretches a strong arm forward, extending the strange, warped hand that had fallen victim to an injury she’s never had, and splaying her crooked fingers wide, as she reaches out to grasp Lila’s thin shoulder...

And stares, as every inch of her arm, starting from the tips of her fingers and stretching to the space just below her elbow, simply… crumbles to black dust. It has burned so fast, so instantly, that she hadn’t had time to feel it, to determine if the burn was searing hot or freezing cold. 

Allison stares at the… at the  _ space  _ where her arm had once been, and shrieks. Klaus’s wiry arms wrap around her waist, tugging her back and away. 

It’s that scream, high and ragged and earsplitting, that pulls Lila from the deep, dark place where she’s fallen within herself, weighed down by the weight of all that power. She looks up from the bottom,  _ looks  _ at the room she’s in, and finds the strength to speak to them. 

“You’re here. Why?” The words catch in Lila’s throat, grinding like chunks of broken glass. 

“To help you,” Vanya says, but Lila can hardly hear her, over the rattling inside her chest.

“How?” 

Silence. None of them have any idea what to do, least of all the woman standing in front of her, who knows what is happening inside of her, who has heard the weak skip of her heart and can feel it starting to shut down as it turns to diamond. Who knows that her body has shriveled and hardened into hardly more than a sarcophagus for a living, volatile source of power that is building and building and  _ building, _ waiting to be set free by its holder’s death. 

And when it does,  _ oh, _ when it does...

“This is your power, isn’t it?”

Vanya nods.

Lila scoffs. “I hate it. I didn’t agree to this to be better than you. I don’t  _ want  _ to be like you. I don’t want to be like any of you. I want to be like  _ me.” _ Her eyes are burning, but then, so is everything else. “Why doesn’t anyone  _ want  _ that?” 

There’s a memory, flashing bright in her mind. Six figures in coral-orange, swarming around her, caressing her face, taking her by the arms and leading her in from the cold. It isn’t hers. 

“You know what it’s doing to me, don’t you?” Lila says, “It’s killing me. I can feel it.” 

She's trying to hold it in, to prevent it from exploding all at once. She knows that it's only going to work until she dies, and that the stress of hanging onto it is only exacerbating the process. 

Vanya bites her lip. Somehow, Lila can tell what she’s thinking. She can  _ feel  _ it, appearing inside her own mind from somewhere beyond, hearing it as clearly as though it had been said aloud:  _ We still have to try.  _

_ Oh, _ Lila thinks, so lost inside her own pain that she cannot conceive that the world is bigger than it.  _ Why would you ever bother doing that, when no one has before? What makes you think you’re so different? You’re not  _ that  _ special. _

**“I heard a rumor that you’re going to live.”**

Lila does not lose the horrible internal radiance that is cooking her from the inside out. Her skin does not turn from blinding blue-white to brown. Her heartbeat does not solidify. She does not suddenly regain feeling in her hands and feet and leap to them and start to dance merrily.

There’s no change at all. 

Lila rolls her heavy eyes over towards Allison, clutching the numb little nub of her half-arm and staring at her with wild hope in her eyes, and finds enough strength to let out a sharp, hacking laugh. “I’m  _ sorry, _ did I take your hearing as well? Or are you just stupid?”

It breaks over them like a wave: the realization that they won’t be able to save her, that there are no wounds that time cannot heal, but the Hargreeves family do not have time. This is happening. 

Months ago, Diego might’ve tried to speed things up, to plunge a knife into her neck and get it done, to put her out of their misery in the hopes that it will make that source of terrible power simply vanish into the wind, instead of surging up to snap at him for daring to harm its keeper. 

Now, he doesn’t even so much as consider it. Even if it would’ve saved the world, he couldn’t have done it. She’ll be gone in a minute, and it won’t have mattered to anyone but them. They can’t spend the rest of their lives, well,  _ afterlives, _ knowing that they had gone and struck someone down for shining too bright, for being too much. 

He decides to stay, as all of his siblings do, to ensure that she dies as well as she can. That she not go alone. 

“We’ve done so much to each other,” he says, “We’ve just been going around and around, hurting each other. Half the time we didn’t even mean to, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t do it.” 

Lila feels a horrible throbbing in her eye, as it starts to blur up. “Sorry about that,” she says, trying to lift the stiff corner of her lip into a smile. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Diego says. 

Lila drags her eyes over to look to Allison, being clung to by so many of her brothers. “And that. Whoops.”

“It’s not fatal,” Allison says, with a voice knotted with pain. “You know what they say, about grabbing onto hot stoves.” 

“Jesus Christ, Allison,” Ben says.

“Can I make a joke? No?”

Five swallows thickly. There’s something he has to do, for the both of them. He doesn’t really believe she’ll accept it, but it has to be done, has to be tried. “I’m sorry,” he says, meaning it. “For what I did to you. For what I did to your family.”

“Just following orders?” she croons, feeling her mother’s voice trickle into her tone.

“No,” Five says. “Somewhere along the way, I… it was me. Just me.”

Lila looks at him.

“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done, and it… I did this,” he says.  _ “I _ did this.”

He believes it; of all of them, Lila might’ve been the only one who could have had a normal life, with parents who loved her, and powers that wouldn’t have killed her. She would have grown up ordinary. She would have grown up. And he had taken that from her. 

Lila knows it too. She knows it because he knows it, because he is thinking it in her presence, because she cannot stop this power from expanding like air does, to fill every crevice of the room it’s in. She knows that he is sincere, she feels it, plucking at the strings of her heart that are still soft and fleshy. She knows it in the way that she knows that Klaus is looking at the ghosts, sitting in the corner, the ones watching her with burnt-out holes for eyes, the ones she does not have the energy to fear anymore. She knows it in the way that she knows that Ben is trying to think of something to say, about how this terrible thing she's going to cause doesn't make her a monster; it's sweet, really, but she doesn't really _care_ about that.

“That’s nice,” Lila says. “You’re a sweet talker.” She’s trying to be witty, but the words tumble out rough and unpolished as gravel, and they hurt on the way out of her. “But it’s not  _ all  _ about you, you know,” she teases.  _ “So _ egotistical. You’re not  _ that  _ special, Number Five. She’d have just gotten someone else to do it. You know it.”

She isn’t sure if she  _ can  _ forgive him, to be honest, being that he looms so large and terrible in her memory. But she can try. Everything’s ending soon, so she can try. She’s been weighed down by this, by all of this, for as long as she can remember, and she’s so  _ tired  _ of it.

The bad blood between her and him, between her and the rest of this family, is so deep. There’s an ocean of it, and she’s been stranded in it for so long. But there’d been a similar divide between them and Vanya, and they’d bridged it, hadn’t they? 

But there’d been time, with Vanya. There’d been time, and there’d been a chance.

And there hasn’t been one, with Lila. There’d been no time for them to be anything more for each other than enemies. There’d been no time for her to learn this power, to understand it, to be able to carry the weight of a world of people without crushing herself under it, without being hollowed out completely to be the vessel for other people’s hopes and dreams and wants and  _ everything. _ Not because anything was inherently wrong with the power, or with the person wielding it, but because no one had so much as tried. 

“Do you think, maybe, if things were different...” she says, “There was never a chance, though. What a waste.” Her lips turned heavy and numb and gummy. “What a…” She sighs. Her breaths are so shallow now, her head as soft and airy as though she were lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, in the moments before she drops into a much-needed sleep. 

Shame about the rest of them. About the world. It’s so big, and there’s so much of it, it’s all going to be over in a minute. Across from her, the family is joining hands, and she wants to lift hers up, to reach for them, even if she’s just going to burn them up with her touch, but they’re too heavy. They don’t listen, when she tells them to move. 

She watches Vanya raise her violin up to under her chin, preparing to play, and is flooded with a deluge of warm memory. Lila’s fingers twitch reflexively, plucking at invisible strings to a song she has never heard in person, and only exists in her mind. It had been played when the world ended, that very first time. This instrument is important to her, is her very heart... and her lightning rod. 

_ Oh, _ Lila realizes.  _ When it all comes out of me, she’s going to catch it.  _ She pictures it in her mind, an arc of blue light, bouncing off the stroke of the bone-white bow, searing a clean path through the ceiling, through the roof, up and out of the sky, deep into space. It’s the middle of the day, and there is no moon to shatter. They’ll be fine. The world will keep on spinning without her. 

“Good,” she says, without really meaning to. “That’s good.” 

She doesn’t feel angry, at the thought that she is with them. What Lila had taken to be the cause of her pain for so long, she now sees as the cure. This family has haunted her for so long, and now finally,  _ finally, _ they will exorcise her. She looks at them, really looks at them, and wishes again that she could have known them differently. And she knows, in the way that she knows all things about them, that they are thinking the same. 

For a single moment in her short, sad life, Lila finds a sense of absolute peace and hovers within it, suspended above all the earth. 

At the center of the terrible star in their midst, there is an exhale. It is not followed by an inhale. 

And then, the light.


	2. crying days are through

On the thirty-first of July, the world does not end.

The days that follow it, the first days of the rest of their lives, are the worst.

The Hargreeves family, all equally depleted, gather themselves and wait for the authorities to arrive, to tell them that the threat has ended, that the world is safe, that the city’s residents may return. They answer questions numbly: _yes, the end of the world has been prevented, yes, they are safe now, yes, the Umbrella Academy saved them, yes, their father has died in the implosion, yes, the Umbrella Academy is ending all vigilante operations, effective immediately. No, there will be no photo ops._

They patch their wounds up with what’s left of the infirmary, and they take Allison to the hospital to see what’s to be done about her arm.

They cremate their father for the second time, and scatter his ashes in the courtyard for the second time. As before, Grace and Pogo are in attendance, having taken the citywide call to return as one that applies to them as well, and seeing no reason to fear the house, now that its master is dead. This time, no one says a word when what’s left of Sir Reginald Hargreeves is emptied out into the dirt. He has gone to ash, like the rest of the world from which he’d come, and it is a fitting end, and a permanent one.

There’d been nothing left of Lila to bury.

A flock of lawyers descends on the family, like a swarm of suited vultures, eager to appraise the damages, and to aid the siblings in gaining their inheritance.

Inheritance. Right. Their father is dead, and his estate is passing on to them. He’d reinstated them as his heirs, and now they will benefit from his passing, which strikes them as rather odd; privately, each of the Hargreeves siblings has thought of their father donating the entirety of his estate to some vague mystery relative, or some charity, or finding some legal loophole ensuring that his corpse will hang onto it, and will require the house to be transformed into his own modern pyramid.

This is not so. By the time the process is all said and done, the seven of them are collectively worth just under forty-two billion dollars. 

They’re set for life, and so are their theoretical children and grandchildren. They’ll never need to work, never need to worry about money, never need to worry about anything that can be solved with money ever again. In fact there’s so much of it that it’s hard to wrap their minds around, let alone know what to do with it. 

They decide to stay put, for a while. The public is taking the news of their father’s death quite hard, as in this world, Vanya had not written her book, so there are no allegations against their father’s abuse. In this world, the Umbrella Academy is still together, and so they are more or less trapped inside the smoldering half-wrecked ruin of their house, as throngs of fans thick enough to warrant redirection of the city’s traffic surround the place for two weeks, before Allison **heard a rumor that you all fucked off and forgot about us.**

Much of the house is destroyed, apart from the four-layer hole burned through the infirmary ceiling. The fourth and fifth floors are utterly inaccessible, and there’s a hole in the foyer ceiling that sends rain waterfalling down into the hall every time there’s a storm, which is often. Their bedrooms are still there, still intact, but none of the siblings are enthused about separating so quickly, especially to rooms they’ve never slept in. 

Instead, they take to dragging mattresses down into the parlor, in front of the fireplace, and piling them high with pillows and blankets. There, they sleep in a puppy pile, with only Pogo returning to his little apartment in the basement, and Grace to her recharging station.

They stay inside, and they adopt the schedule of hermits, sleeping through the day and staying up at night, pacing the halls and dusting rubble out of the path of bare feet, playing games of tug-of-war with Mr. Pennycrumb (all of which he wins, apart from the ones he plays with Luther) using the imported velvet curtains Reginald had always made it a point to show any guests who would come to the house. 

There’s a lot of crying, and a lot of fighting over things that don’t matter at all, and a lot of sitting in remote corners of the house and staring at the woodgrain of the walls and just thinking about everything that’s happened.

They’ve had so much of their lives dictated by chaos; the Hargreeves siblings, and each and every one of those other siblings who they know not at all or knew so fleetingly, were born in a flash and whelped into the world at random; their _births_ may have been calculated on the part of their father, but _their_ births were utterly out of his hands. They survived infancy long enough to be discovered by their father, solely on a whim, and their childhood was defined by their father’s attempt to stamp out the chaos of it. Everything had been controlled, and because Reginald had tried so hard to hide them from chaos, chaos had seen fit to ensure that everything had fallen apart and exploded in spectacular fashion, sending them running on a quest through time and space that would certainly make a wonderful story to tell their grandchildren one day, but hadn’t been a whole lot of fun in the moment, as many calamitous times in one’s life often are. 

But it’s over. All of it is. They’re free, but they don’t feel like it. They were born to save the world, and having done it, the Hargreeves family looks at itself, and wonders what’s to be done with them, now that they’re free. They’re children of the apocalypse, and now the apocalypse is over, and the world is still here, and it will be here tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, so what’s the _use_ of them?

They figure it out, of course. 

The thing is, they were meant to save the world, but they were meant for other things too. They were meant for sleeping late into the morning, and taking late-night walks to shabby little diners for coffee and doughnuts, and making sandwiches in the basement kitchen while sharing secrets. They were meant for falling asleep in the bathtub after soaking for an obnoxiously long amount of time, and arguing about which color of yarn suits a puppy’s fur best, and drinking coffee from Petrello’s, and sitting on the counter in the basement kitchen with a tub of Frosty Ice Cream in their laps while discussing the way the leaves in the city park catch fire in October. People do not need to be useful in any way to deserve to live, and the Hargreeves siblings were meant for it, for living simply for the sake of living. 

They will, it must be said. They will, and then some.

After all, chaos, by definition, simply must birth a happy ending or two once in a while. 

* * *

Things start to happen after their birthday.

October first arrives, and with it, the family suddenly rouses from this half-summer of somnolence, rising and realizing that they’ve spent two months in a state of shock and listlessness, that the world has kept turning despite them, and that they are now all older. They are thirty and thirty and thirty-plus-one-month, and thirty-plus-ten-months, and thirty-but-also-fifty-nine-but-also-eighteen, and thirty and thirty. 

And they have two-thirds of their lives left to live, even Five, who is beginning his second.

And that’s the thing. Life is so _long,_ or at least, it should be. There is so much to do. They cannot stay like this forever, wrapped up in the house like maggots hiding in a corpse. They have to step out into the sun and live, or otherwise, they have let what’s happened to them won; it will not have killed them, but it will have succeeded in making ghosts of them.

And. Well. The Hargreeves siblings, despite their better natures, are all just a little bit spiteful. 

So on that fine morning, Luther untangles himself from Allison’s arms, and pads down to the kitchen, the main one, the one they often eschew in favor of its much more sparse counterpart in the basement, and he fumbles through the creation of the doughiest birthday cake ever made. 

On that fine morning, Diego walks out of the rear entrance of the house, stepping outside for the first time in months, and makes the misty morning walk to the closest corner store that sells doughnuts. It isn’t Griddy’s, but since Griddy’s is a pile of rubble a few blocks away, it will have to do. 

On that fine morning, Allison rolls weakly out of bed, and stumbles into the shower for the first time in weeks, and looks at what’s left of her arm without flinching, in a way her father would never be able to. She decides she’s going to wear short sleeves for the first time in months, just in case his ghost is still floating around and too chickenshit to pop up in front of Klaus. 

On that fine morning, Klaus gets up and goes around to all the windows in the house, or rather, to all the ones he can reach, throwing the curtains open to let the light in. All the glass has been shattered from them, and had been swept from the streets a month ago, and he hangs his legs from an empty windowsill, staring down into the street. He decides that they’re going to need to order replacements, and this time, there’ll be no more warped, smoky glass. This time, they’ll get ones they’ll be able to actually see out of. 

On that fine morning, Ben is sitting in their father’s study unattended, with his boots kicking clumps of mud from the courtyard onto his enormous fine desk. He had gone out into the courtyard, stomped over the space that held his statue in another world, gotten his boots nice and disgusting, and then taken them off, before putting them on as he entered the study, and making sure to drag his feet the way Dad hated.

The Hargreeves siblings are all a little spiteful. Ben’s brand of spite is what one would call pettiness. 

He’s reading one of Five’s books on dog training, the one with lots of pictures and less obtuse language. He’d like to figure out what kind of command it’ll take to convince Mr. Pennycrumb, who has promptly exploded in size, and is probably half hellhound, to stop crowding Vanya out of her bed. They’ve all only just started sleeping in their own rooms again, which is nice because he doesn’t have to worry about anyone else’s bad dreams but his own, unless he’s sleeping over. 

Less nice, is the groggy way Vanya is wandering through the house as of late, because Mr. Pennycrumb has chosen to sleep in her bed above anyone else’s. This is a problem, in that Mr. Pennycrumb is now roughly Vanya’s size, and twice her density, and he is apparently a real hog of her space, to such an extent that she is now in the habit of being banished to the floor of her own bedroom multiple times a week. It doesn’t particularly surprise Ben, being that Vanya’s bed is of a size that suggests it is meant for a sickly Victorian orphan, rather than a thirty-year-old woman just over five feet tall. 

So, Ben has decided to find whatever command it’ll take to get the dog out of the bed. Hence, his scouring of Five’s books. 

He kind of regrets reading this one though. All basic obedience, and no complex commands for dogs trained to literally eviscerate intruders, but also to sit still and tolerate Klaus painting their nails, and to wrench Diego’s shoulder with high-intensity games of fetch. The pictures are nice though. That collie is cute, but Ben, being a habitual wearer of the color black, would probably not be able to stand it in real life.

Still, in picture form: cute. 

Ben sighs, unlacing his boots, and leaving them on the fine wooden desk, before padding off to Five’s room, to return the book and ask about another. Come to think of it, he should really just ask Five about the bed problem. Knowing him, it’ll be solved by nightfall. 

Ben rounds the corner, ready to ask about it…

And pauses.

In the hallway in front of Five’s room, there are noises. 

The rustling of fabric, the creak of the wall under a certain person-sized amount of weight, a stifled gasp and… Vanya, _giggling._

Ben should probably just turn around and walk away. Instead, he flattens himself to the wall, and presses his ear to it. If this is going where he thinks it’s going, Diego owes him five bucks. 

A soft metal clinking, and footsteps, leading clumsily backwards into his bedroom. The squeak of a mattress, and...

“Wait.” It’s Five. _“Dad’s bed.”_

Silence.

 _Oh my God,_ thinks Ben. _No._

 _"Oh my God,”_ whispers Vanya. “Yes.” 

A flurry of footsteps down the hall, two shapes flying past Ben so quickly they hadn’t even noticed him at all, skidding hand-in-hand down the hall and around the corner, and then the door that Ben knows to be their father’s, slamming shut.

As mentioned before, the Hargreeves siblings are spiteful creatures. 

They don’t see the two of them until late that night, at which point the news has spread through the house like wildfire, at which point Ben is five dollars richer, and at which point Vanya leaves Klaus hanging for a particularly inappropriate high-five. 

They stay for Luther’s rather sad-looking cake, eating undercooked slices and having a sort of informal contest to see who makes the most disgusted face (it’s Allison). 

It must be noted that Vanya Hargreeves has always hated holidays. Growing up, the family had never been allowed to celebrate any, save the mansion’s occasional Christmas galas, in which she would be shut up in her room and safely out of the way, which were all for show anyways. Even after she’d left home, that hate had deepened; though the holiday season brought with it much needed money, which she would earn playing at parties, she would always be reminded of all the ones she’d never been allowed to. She hates the holiday season with the sort of deep, seething anger ordinarily reserved for villains on saturday morning cartoon holiday specials, and she also hates wedding season, having needed to supplement her income by playing for those too. Birthdays are no exception, being that she’d been doomed to share hers with six egotistical siblings who had a party thrown by the city for them every year, while she sat in the basement with the lopsided cupcake Mom had made her and pretended she was okay with it. 

This is relevant, in that this is the first time in Vanya’s life that she has experienced a truly happy birthday.

There will be many more to come.

* * *

Hargreeves Enterprises has been a mainstay in the American market since 1928. At first, the company had been an umbrella manufacturer, but then very soon the company branched out to breakfast cereals, to space and aircraft design, to pharmaceuticals, and, in the early aughts, to celebrity, in the manufacturing of countless merchandising opportunities for the Umbrella Academy, the company’s own stake in the media personality business (and, their very attractive, camera-friendly private army). 

In August of 2019, the company’s stock plummets after the tragic death of its founder and C.E.O. In November, the company itself is dissolved, when his heirs break it up and leave it for the wolves. This is a responsibility mostly left to Five (and Pogo, in an advisorial capacity), in no small part because no one else wants it. None of them has a head for business, nor much of a care for it; seeing as they have enough wealth to last their lifetimes, there’s hardly a reason to keep amassing more of it. 

Once the mess is dealt with, he throws himself into something he actually cares for: the far more important business of rebuilding. The city’s been damaged severely by Lila’s implosion, and, being that it was in most ways the fault of the Hargreeves family that every window within thirty miles of the city limits had been shattered, electrical grids overrun, seven hundred thousand people sent fleeing to kingdom come, only to be summoned back a day later… well. They owe their hometown a debt. 

And, being that they have the funds to do so, Five sets to paying it. Half of Midtown needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, and the entire length of Morrison Street needs to be repaved, and Five has certain opinions about how it’s to be done. Being that he simply cannot trust anyone aside from himself to do it properly, he throws himself into it, funding construction crews and going so far as to begin paying for other projects as well, reopening the Regent downtown and renovating the Icarus uptown and funding the Argyle Branch of the City Public Library, and fixing the shit fucking rail lines, God _damn_ their city’s a _mess..._

The very first place he pays to have rebuilt is a certain little diner that’d been demolished a few months back, an old favorite of his family's. 

* * *

They talk about moving. About packing up what few effects in the bedrooms that were never theirs they’ve become fond of, and leaving the house forever. Maybe they’d sell it, maybe they’d just leave it to rot in the middle of Midtown, but they’d be far away, someplace deep in the woods, someplace where no one could find them.

They decide against it. 

The house itself isn’t haunted, no more than any other house has its fair share of wandering spirits, even if most days it sure feels like it. Their father is not here any longer, nor is Lila, nor the strange siblings who they’d never had the time to know. 

The house is rooted to them, deep into their bones, and they carry it everywhere. It is theirs and they are its, and they will not part with it. It will stay theirs, and they will make it theirs. They will drown out the old memories with new ones, with happier ones, until the terrible ones are so outnumbered that they are swept away by the flood of the good; they will not be forgotten, but they will be flotsam on the waves, spinning out past the horizon until they are nothing more than a distant dream. 

And besides, it’s important in a way none of them can quite explain yet, that they not isolate themselves. Disappearing into the wild is an immensely attractive idea, but it won’t help them forever. They’d been raised as recluses, only emerging to cause serious collateral damage in their flashy missions, before vanishing into the bowels of the house once more. 

It’s important for them to stay, to not shrink away and hide from the world forever, even if they’re only taking small baby steps out into it, each at their own pace. It’s important for them to stay in the city in which they were born and raised, that they get to _know_ it in a way that only Vanya, Klaus and Diego had been afforded to before, after they’d left, when it had become home to them.

So. They are staying.

Which means, they really need to do something about the two-thirds of the house that are utterly demolished. 

So, Ben and Klaus roll up their sleeves, and set to it. 

The first thing they do is root out all the cameras in the rooms and halls that are still intact. They build a bonfire in the courtyard, and set them on fire. 

Once that’s done, they set to rebuilding the grand staircase, and restoring their access to the upper floors of the house; while sending Five up to the attic every few hours is rather fun, Klaus misses climbing up on the roof and drinking, and would quite like to regain that old ritual. 

They take down the portraits of their father in the study. Of Five’s grim childhood self. 

Ben wants to burn them, but Diego advises against it, insisting that they wait, that they save them, that they might serve some use someday. They have Luther rip the door from the cell in the basement, and they set Five’s neatly along the hall leading to it, and fling their father’s in unceremoniously. Soon, the old cell fills fast, with action figures and console games and cereal boxes and comics and clippings of magazine articles, until the glass cases lining the halls are emptied out entirely. 

There’s a fight, about what to do with the portraits of them. The ones of the people whose lives they’d crashed into from outside of time, the Umbrella Academy who’d debuted seven strong, and never broken up. Five wants them gone, Allison wants them to remain as they are, and in the end, the compromise that is reached is that they will stay, but their father’s face will be scrubbed out with paint remover. 

With that, they move officially into the improvement phase of their remodeling, and there are a lot of improvements to make: refitting the windows that face the street with glass that isn’t purposefully obscured. Adding a perfectly ordinary elevator and a modernized infirmary. Having heating pumped to Pogo’s neat little apartment in the basement. Rebuilding the greenhouses and filling them with plants, some tropical, some vegetable, because Luther wants to take up gardening, and takes food security very seriously. Adding an… “An _aquarium?”_

(“Yeah,” Ben says. “A whole wall. Just aquarium. Indulge me.”)

(“Why?”)

(“Because it’s cool. We could snorkel in it, even. It’ll be long and wide enough for that.”)

(“A wise decision. What kind of fish do you want?”)

(“The colorful ones. Can we get a starfish? I want a starfish. And like, eight crabs. The ones with the fun little shells you can paint.”)

Grace gets her own room, and they spend an afternoon dragging her charging station into it. It has massive windows facing the street, the set of gleaming skyscrapers that rise from Uptown and glow at night. It’s the best view in the house. 

Allison and Luther tear down the wall between their bedrooms. It takes a week or two for them to push their beds together, but when they do, they hang a canopy, and string warm golden lights through it. Allison contributes her flouncy pink satin cushions, and Luther his warm blue flannel bedspread. 

Vanya quietly collects her belongings, what few she has, and moves them up a flight of stairs. She makes no announcement, simply does it quietly. She is sleeping one door down from Klaus, locked in an eternal feud for space in her bed with the ever-growing and ever-greedy Mr. Pennycrumb, and then she simply… isn’t. 

Klaus knows where she went.

The second Vanya sets her violin down on Five’s bed, and makes it hers as well, Klaus takes a sledgehammer to the wall they share. She’s lured back downstairs by the plastery _thud,_ and is leaning in the doorway, watching curiously as he punches a hole big enough to stick his face through. When he does, he meets eyes with her, and grins.

“Seeing as you won’t be needing it anymore,” he says, “And as I’ll be sharing, I’ll need the extra room.”

Vanya nods tolerantly, and takes a few steps into the room, extending a pale hand towards him. It takes a moment, for him to realize what she’s asking for. But when he does, he laughs, and hands her the sledgehammer.

This time, Vanya tears down the wall with him, laughing all the while. It’s the most fun he’s ever had with her.

* * *

The St. Pluvium Chamber Orchestra isn’t auditioning for any new violins right now, and won't be for another three years; when they do, Vanya Hargreeves will seize her old spot of third chair, and make her meteoric rise to first. Until then, Vanya is going to have quite a bit of time on her hands. She can’t spend all of it busking downtown just for the fun of it, so she needs to fill it with something. 

She finds it, when she wanders into the office that once been Dad’s and is now everyone’s, and, while picking through the tchotchkes on his desk, she discovers his old battered typewriter. 

Vanya hovers her fingers over the keys, mimicking the spidery movements of hands in the midst of writing. She hadn’t used a typewriter since… well.

Vanya thinks a lot about _Extra Ordinary._

In this world, her autobiography does not exist. She understands why, of course; in the world from which Vanya had come, she’d written it to vent her feelings, to cut herself a tiny slice of the family’s fame and make it hers, to cry out to the universe that she is real too, to write a happy ending for herself, in the hopes that by putting it out into the world, it might be persuaded to come looking for her. In this world, the Vanya that was native to it hadn’t needed to do that. She’d had all of the fame, and all of the recognition, and all of the power with which to channel her anger through. It hadn't been enough to save the world, but it'd been enough to ensure the book would never be written.

And in the one from which Vanya comes, her family had mostly hated her for it. So often, she’d regretted having written it at all, but now, in a world where her book does not exist, she finds herself longing for it. She hadn’t written it for the best of reasons, and it hadn’t been entirely truthful, or even particularly well-made, but it had been _hers._

She wants that. Not all of what her book had been, but what it had given her: something all hers, to make out of nothing, and send into the world for people to see. She doesn’t feel the need to tear herself open and display her secrets to the world, let alone her family’s, but she wants to _make_ something nonetheless, and maybe, in the act of writing it, she will work those pieces of her and her family into it anyway, but in a way that is new and transformative, that will reveal something she hadn’t even considered before. 

So, Vanya, with all the time in the world, dusts off the typewriter, and squeezes into the plush leather chair, and she starts writing. 

When her manuscript finds its way to the publishing house next year, they won’t receive an autobiography, or a memoir, or a tell-all. It’ll be something entirely original.

* * *

The escapees of Hotel Oblivion haven’t been faring well. Many were rearrested after the initial breakout, and many more are back to their old ways, or else struggling to make ends meet in other ways. Many are working two or three dead-end jobs to keep cramped apartments, if they’re working at all, if they can find housing at all. 

Luther knows this because of Diego and Allison’s prudent detective work, and because of the two dozen private eyes he’d hired to pick up the slack and hunt the location of each and every person listed in the guest book down. Not because he doubts his family’s investigative skill (well, he doubts Vanya’s, seeing as she’d spent an hour raising the alarm, citing a burglar in the house, who’d taken her ‘stolen’ violin, only to find the instrument sitting on her bedside table. He doubts _hers,_ but not theirs), but because there’s a lot of ground to cover, and he’d like to get this done as quickly as possible. 

Some of the victims of Hotel Oblivion were perfectly innocent, some… decidedly not, but it doesn’t matter. None of them deserved what they endured on the dark side of the moon, and none of them can possibly get better if they’re back in prison, or on the streets, or struggling to make ends meet and staring at high-end jewelry stores and banks with a desperate twinkle in their eyes, knowing they shouldn’t, but seeing such an easy fix for such an escapable problem…

All deserve to start over, is what he’s getting at.

And he has the resources with which to facilitate that. He has their father’s lawyers, who are now their _family’s_ lawyers, on retainer, and he sics most of them on those of the family’s former foes who’d been locked away. The rest, he calls upon to draw up a fund from their family’s absurdly high stockpile of cash. 

Reparations need to be paid, for up to eighteen years of pain and suffering on the Moon. It probably won’t lead to forgiveness, but Luther’s alright with that. Their family has a lot to answer for. They’ve caused a lot of harm, and he thinks it fair and just that they own up to it, and do what they can to mend the wounds they’ve created.

Some, he knows, will never heal. But that doesn’t mean they can’t try. 

And besides. Leave their former enemies to the way things are going now, and they’ll be right back at it, for lack of any other opportunity. They’ll spawn new enemies, relatives seeking revenge and retribution, and while Luther understands the Old Testament urge to come beat the ass of the snotty little child soldiers who’d cut your stepmother’s legs off, he knows that it’s a cycle that’s not going to end in anything other than more pain. 

He takes a look at the proposal for the fund. Everyone who’d been incarcerated in Hotel Oblivion, with a little caveat for everyone who’d been born there (thus far, a single beneficiary, by the name of Oscar, aged one-and-a-half, or as his mother puts it, eighteen months), is going to be set for life, with all therapy and hospital bills provided for. So are the families of everyone who’d died there, which Luther is… less sure of. Dad liked keeping thorough records, but not about that. Figures. He’ll have to do some more digging, and he'll highball it, just to be sure. 

Anyway. They have the money, and frankly, he isn’t sure if this is overkill or not, but it feels right, so he decides it’ll do nicely. Most of them won’t forgive his family for what they’ve done, and he’s at peace with it. He figures that the nicest thing he can do is give them something for their pain and suffering, and then leave them be.

Luther signs it. 

He has a meeting in an hour with the troll-creature he and Diego had encountered some months ago, who he now knows is named Clarissa, and who is the mother of a rather adorable baby he would like to someday earn the honor of being the host to many, many shoulder-back rides for. They’re having brunch.

* * *

The house is enormous, and somehow, even with contractors and construction crew present around the clock, it’s too quiet. 

Diego knows why, of course. It’d been built for far more people than had ever inhabited it. There are forty-two bedrooms (forty-one? Forty?), and most of them have never even been inhabited. They’re trapping that stillness inside their walls, and it’s deafening. The only thing that makes the place tolerable is the noise the nine of them make, but now, Diego is about to witness it losing a little more of that noise.

Ben’s already gone much of the day, off at the university. He’s decided to go, mostly because he’d been courting the idea a few months before he died, and he wants to give it a spin, to see if it really _had_ been for him. And also because, as Ben puts it, “Listen, I get to go to this place, where I get to read, and then argue with people about how they’re wrong about what we read for hours. What _isn’t_ great about that?” 

_You already do that with us,_ Diego had thought, but he had kept it to himself. Far be it from him to judge how any of them spend their time anymore. If Ben wants to aggressively judge a bunch of strangers about their opinions on Chekhov, far be it from him to prevent it. 

It’s Grace’s absence that he’s going to feel a little more intensely. 

She’s her own person now (person? Android? Gynoid?), and part of being her own person, it seems, is building for herself a life outside of the house. Part of that, she has determined, is having a job, not for the sake of earning money, but because she wants to have something that is all hers, that she can fill her days with, that will put her in contact with lots of people. Grace has a lot of ideas, and she’d been cycling through them all, eagerly using the family as a sounding board.

She’s entertained translation, interior design, cooking, accounting, primatology and a dozen other career paths, and if she writes for herself the right strip of code, she can probably do a dozen more, but ultimately, Grace has settled on _surgeon._ There is value in each and every one of the paths she’d considered, but she quite likes this one. Lots of people can make the world beautiful, but not everyone has as steady a hand as Grace’s mechanical ones, and unlike most people, Grace is not squeamish in the slightest, and her recall is perfect. This is the area she thinks might be able to keep her busy and stimulated, where she might be able to do a lot of good, and she is quite excited about it. 

Of course, being that she’s spent thirty years as a robotic housewife, she has to go through the process of getting a doctorate first, which pisses her off a little, seeing as she already has the knowledge pre-loaded into her hardware. But that was a little difficult to explain to the directors at Huxley General, who’d already been pushing it by agreeing that since it wasn’t technically _illegal_ for a robot to be a surgeon, they would at least consider her, and Allison didn’t like the idea of simply _persuading_ them to let her in anyway, so she’s got to do this the long way.

Well, the ‘long’ way. Being that she’ll be able to rocket through any assignment thrown her way, and does not require sleep or sustenance, she expects that she’ll be able to finish her training at the city medical college in record time. Maybe she can spend it making _friends!_ She’s never been to a campus before; there are probably lots of interesting people to meet. 

Diego is helping her choose an outfit for her first day, and he has a lot of opinions. 

“No, no, no, no,” Diego says. “That one.”

“The pink one?”

“Yeah, that. With the shoes.”

“The shoes.”

“Yeah, the shoes.” 

Grace stares at him. Then at her entire closet full of shoes. Then back at him. 

“The white ones,” he clarifies. Then, again: “With the pointy toes. Without any of the bows or patterns or anything.” 

“Oh. Yes, that would be _quite_ nice, wouldn’t it?” 

Grace smiles at him, then frowns. He’s tense.

“Is everything alright? Don’t lie.”

Diego grimaces, but relents: “I don’t know what to do with myself. Everyone’s got something happening, except for me. They’re all _building_ something. Five’s got… well, he’s got half the city. Luther’s got that thing with Clarisse, Klaus and Ben are literally rebuilding the house, and Vanya’s got her book.”

“And Allison?”

“That’s different. She needs that therapy. And when she’s done, I’m sure she’s got something planned. She keeps going to the library to meet with those activist friends of hers.”

“Is it so inconceivable, that Allison has friends?”

“She’s Allison. She _never_ socializes.”

“Point taken. I expect she’s organizing, then.”

“See? She’s got something going for her. Or, she will. All of them do. And I’m just… _here._ " Diego frowns. He should be over it already. He knows, already, that he doesn't have to be _great_ to be _good,_ but... "I feel useless.” 

“Oh, Diego,” Grace sighs. “You’re the furthest thing from useless. In fact, I’d say you’re doing something incredibly valuable.” 

“Yeah? What?”

“Being here. I _like_ talking to you. Dr. Pogo does too, you know, and he’ll be in need of a friend more than ever, since I’ll be so busy. The small things matter just as much, Diego dear.” 

She squeezes his hand reassuringly, and he squeezes back, noting that she’s changed the color of the plastic chips that pass as her nails. 

“It feels like they’re all moving on, and I’m just treading water.” 

“Do you think perhaps there’s something preventing you from moving on?” 

“I know it.” 

“Care to share? I’m a good listener, I promise.” 

Diego gnaws on his lip for a moment. “Alright,” he says. It’s about Lila.”

* * *

While her siblings focus on improving the world, Allison has to spend the bulk of her time improving herself. 

There are those hours spent at the library with a group of very nice old women, helping them decorate signs and pointing them towards the resources Ray and Miles and Jill had told her about, that’ve only grown and evolved in the years since, which Allison has decided that she needs to reacquaint herself with. And yeah, it’s a little disconcerting to Allison that of all the people she’s managed to find herself getting along with, it’s a group of women who’d been up and kicking in the decade in which Allison had learned to be an ordinary person, the youngest of whom still being over twice Allison’s age. 

(But hey, they’re nice, and they don’t recognize her from any of the Umbrella Academy memorabilia still circulating en masse, seeing as this world’s Academy only officially broke up and ceased operations in August. And Florence always brings cinnamon cookies, which Allison appreciates dearly.) 

But it’s still only three days out of the week. 

Allison spends the other four in physical therapy. 

Losing an arm (or, well, half an arm) is a lot, even if you don’t really feel it. Even if it’s the arm that you never really had a strong relationship to, being that it was the one that had suffered that strange injury in that divergent version of her teenhood fight with Dr. Terminal. Even after she’d settled into the rest of her body, the hand had still remained a source of discomfort; it had never really been _hers,_ so in losing it, Allison is… well. She’s not happy about it. Obviously. But she’s not _sad_ either.

It’s really more of a functional thing: it is a limb, and losing limbs is terrifying. She thought she’d been done with phantom pain when she’d finally felt herself settle in this body that is hers yet isn’t, but nope, she’s back to the races, waking up and clutching her nub and feeling it pulse with pain, or even completely forgetting that she can’t just pick things up with her right hand anymore, and dropping lots and lots of plates. 

And it had been her _right_ arm, the one she actually needs to do things with. Like writing. Allison now has to force herself to become left-handed, and she hates every minute of it. Her wonderfully loopy handwriting is now the chicken scratch of a preschooler.

So. She’s in physical therapy, stretching her shoulder and elbow, building up endurance, four days a week. Vanya takes the taxi to the facility where Allison completes it, and is there to take her home when she’s done, and helps her with her exercises at home. 

She tried the masseuse. She almost broke the masseuse’s neck with a knee-jerk reaction that she really is _so_ embarrassed about. She sent the masseuse on an all-expenses-paid trip to Bermuda for a month. She will no longer be trying the masseuse. 

She’s consulting with a prosthetist, and she’ll have her new arm from Meritech in a month or two. It’s really just a matter of which one she wants. Something skin-colored might be nice in theory, but Allison gets the sense it’ll just lead to forgetting that the thing isn’t real, which will lead to even _more_ broken plates, and a few hair-raising moments when she looks down and _remembers._ The pretty ones, with the designs are probably what she’ll go with, but then there begins the business of choosing what to put on it. She wonders if the stress of envisioning all her choices is what normal people do when they choose tattoos.

And then there’s the hand itself. Allison has, rather controversially, opted for the normal-looking one, and not the hook that Diego, Five and Klaus are insisting she choose. 

Which, well. A hook for a hand is actually kind of neat, so Allison at least has her Halloween costume down for the rest of her life. She might have to fight Diego for it, but she'll win. She always wins when they fight.

She’s thinking about that, as she paints.

She’s in the old nursery on the fourth floor, the one they’d all started life in. One and Two and Three and Four and Five and Six and Seven had been here, in numbered cribs, side by side, long before there was a chance to differentiate them, back before they were capable of manipulated against each other. The cribs are still here, and now cradle spiders' nests.

Allison tore the boards off the doors, far slower than she’d have liked to, seeing as she only had one hand to work with. But she’d done it, and had set to work on making this little corner of the house hers. It had survived the blast with nothing more than a shattered window’s worth of damage, being that the infirmary is across the courtyard, and Allison is grateful. 

Luther’s here, beside her, and the two of them are… well. They’re not artists. They can’t make strange, interesting creations on the wall in the way that Klaus is doing with the room he now shares with Ben and Diego. Her trees look like engorged lollipops, and his flowers look like mutated cartoon bunny rabbits, and now that they’ve moved on to filling the ceiling with a sky full of stars and a big, laughing moon that looks a little sinister, because Allison doesn’t understand how to paint eyebrows… well. She has admitted that art is just not for her. 

But it’s theirs. It’s their little project, apart from everything. Luther had found her scrubbing just about a day after she’d broken into the place, and he’d fallen in beside her, following her lead. He’s looking at her a lot, casting her quick, sidelong glances while they work, and ordinarily, she quite enjoys when he looks at her, but here, it feels a little invasive. 

She gets that it’s a little concerning, her being here, given the disaster that had been her and Luther’s attempt to try. She gets that it’s definitely not to do with being nostalgic for her babyhood, and that it’s not the healthiest thing in the world, to start crying in the middle of scrubbing an inch of dust from the floors. 

But it helps. She thinks that maybe, if she opens the wall of sparkling-new windows to let the air in, and adds a fresh coat of paint over the peeling walls, maybe she’ll feel better about it all. About not getting to have this thing she’s wanted so badly, that she still wants. 

Luther’s looking at her again.

“I’m sorry,” Allison snaps. “Is there paint in my hair? There’s paint in _your_ hair, and I’m not staring.”

This is true. There’s a big smear of midnight blue right across his hairline, from when he’d wiped his forehead with the wrong hand. She has been studiously avoiding staring at it for too long. 

But really though. Is there paint in her hair? Shit. She should’ve wrapped it or something. 

Luther smiles. “No, it’s not that.”

“Then what is it?” 

Luther looks away for a moment, a little timidly. Then, his big, leathery hand finds hers.

“How do you feel about adoption?” 

* * *

It’s the twenty-fourth of March, and it has officially been a year.

It has been one year, since their father’s first funeral. One year, since their father’s first death. One year, since Luther had come home from the stars, and Klaus had slunk in from the street with Ben in his shadow, and Diego had stalked in from the boiler room basement and Allison had flown in from California, and Vanya had made that too-long taxi ride from the apartment that had never been hers in this world. 

One year, since Five fell out of the past and back into their lives.

The days faded, one into the next, and the weeks flew by, and they’ve rebuilt the house; the last of the renovations are done, and the upper floors have been restored, the chandelier re-hung, the rooms rebuilt, the enormous fish tank Ben’s obsessed with installed, the portraits of their father taken down and consigned to the dark chamber at the heart of the house, those artifacts he'd 'acquired' from his many trips abroad repatriated. They’ve restored much of Midtown, and dissolved Hargreeves Enterprises and sent Grace to Huxley General and made what peace they could with their former enemies. Allison has her lovely prosthetic hand and they’ve all dropped pretty quickly out of therapy, but they are trying, and they are living and…

And something is missing. 

Five can sense it; they all can. It isn’t just that they’re all flighty, suspicious people, prone to violent dreams and long hours of pacing nervously around and around the halls, or of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. It’s that something is _missing_ from this life they’re sharing, and they cannot explain it, and the restlessness might drive them mad.

So. It’s the twenty-fourth, and it is the day that Five returns to her, and perhaps it’s the anniversary, that has him feeling so restless, that’s had him unable to sleep for days, that’s had him working on the equation he’d started on three months ago at a fever’s pace. Or maybe it’s just the house itself, so large and so empty, filled with rooms that had been meant to be filled, that only ever collected dust, and still stand vacant.

As he always does, when he finds himself so restless, he goes to Vanya. It’s important to take breaks from his frenzied chalkboard scratching, so he’s taking one now, an inch away from an answer to a question that’s been clawing at him for months now. 

Five finds her on the steps, with a toothbrush and a small pail of soapy water, scrubbing the green out of the cracks in the stone lion’s mane. He recognizes the behavior dimly, from the haze of his memories. Forever ago, Vanya would do this, always making sure the lions had their teeth and manes brushed. 

As Vanya had explained it to him, when they’d been twelve and curled up together on a sunny window seat on a Saturday afternoon, she liked to make sure they looked nice, and something about the scrubbing helped her think things through. It’d been before she’d really started on the violin, before she had her music as a way to work through her emotions.

Seeing her return to such an ancient habit strikes Five as curious. He flashes out to the steps, to sit beside her. 

“What is it?” he asks.

Vanya keeps scrubbing. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t be like this with me,” Five chides.

Vanya sighs, dragging a stray strand of dark hair behind her ear. Her hair’s still to short to tie up into a proper ponytail; she’s keeping it that way, and likes the length, generally. But it does get annoying, when she needs to tie it back. “I found out where Harold is.”

Five tenses. “Oh?”

Vanya feels discomforted. He isn’t an easy subject to discuss, especially not with Allison or Five. But she has to discuss it.

Vanya had wondered for months about him, about Leonard Peabody, about Harold Jenkins, about whoever the man she’d once loved and hated and killed had become, in a world in which she never meets him. So, in a writer’s block-fueled lull in the office, she’d gone digging through Dad’s records, to see if anything had arisen.

Her original plan had been to start there, then to head to the Argyle Library, then to the police station, to dig up what records she can.

She hadn’t needed to go any further. 

“He’s dead,” Vanya says, recalling the old police report she’d discovered. “And his life was the same. He still killed his dad when he was a kid, he was still locked up. He still got out and went after the Academy. I still killed him.” She swallows. “Again.”

“And did you…”

“No. As far as I can tell, we were never… together.”

Five looks at her carefully, noting the way she’s drawn the sleeves of her deep red sweater over her wrists, the way she’s been scrubbing the lion’s right eye, over and over. 

“And you have… complicated feelings about this?”

“Very complicated.” 

“Try me.”

Vanya sighs, setting her brush into the soapy water, and dropping down from her knees to sit at Five’s side, to brush her thigh against his. “He was terrible, I know. But he was also a person. I was as well. And you, and all the rest of us. We lived, didn’t we? We got to move on, and start over, and we’re all getting better.” 

“And you feel bad, that he didn’t.”

“I do.”

In fact, Vanya feels bad about a lot more than just that, and she admits as much to Five. She’s haunted by the Sparrows; not by their ghosts, which Klaus has mentioned have vanished. She’s haunted by what might have been, by the thought of a world where they’d grown up all together, where they’d never been sicced on each other. She’s haunted by the rest of their family, by the siblings she hasn’t even gotten a chance to know, who’d died so long ago, who’d also never had a chance. 

“I just…” Vanya frowns. “I think it wasn’t fair. They should’ve had a second chance, just as we have.”

“Lila?”

Vanya feels her heart freeze over, the way it does every time she thinks about her. “Yeah. Her too.” 

Five draws in a breath. He’s been keeping something from her for a while, something he’s been working at for months now, something he knows he has to have right before he tells her. He knows he shouldn’t keep something like this from her, but he also knows how angry she gets when he talks about the subject. Now, he’s reached enough of a breakthrough to feel comfortable in looking to her, drawing her hand into his and saying, “Let’s--”

The door opens, and the pair glance up in annoyance, angry at the interruption. 

“Hey, Five, just to be clear, it wasn’t me who fucked up all that shit on your wall, alright?” It’s Diego, who plops down beside them. 

“You _what.”_

“I swear. It was Mr. Pennycrumb. We were playing fetch and… well, you know how he kinda _slides_ into rooms sometimes? Well, he slid into the wall. And that’s why there’s a giant dog butt print all over the chalk near the floor. Just to be clear.”

Five fumes, but lets it go. If it had been Diego, he’d have dangled him out the fifth-floor window, mostly to make a point. But he knows his puppy, and his particularly clumsy way of running through the polished floors of the house. He can’t stay mad at Mr. Pennycrumb for anything. 

“Fuck,” he curses. “I was so close, too.” 

“To what?”

“My breakthrough. I was an inch from cracking this bitch of a nut, and now I’ve been set back weeks.”

“What are you even trying to _do,_ Five?” Vanya sighs. “You’re not telling me.”

“Because you’ll get mad.”

 _“Oh?”_ Vanya raises an eyebrow. Diego scoots up a few steps, so he’s sitting above them, and no longer between them. He’d like to be out of the range of her disdainful glare when she whips it out. 

“Yes, dear,” Five replies. “You’ll get mad. You’re already mad.”

“I’m not mad,” says Vanya, who’s about sixty percent of the way to mad.

“Alright,” Five says, deciding to humor her. “Sure you’re not.”

“Well maybe I _am,_ then.”

“My God,” Diego groans. “Five, what the hell is it for?”

Five swallows. “I’m prepping an equation that’ll let me time travel.”

“You’re _what?”_

Five throws up his hands. “I said you’d get mad. And listen, I’m not leaving yet. I won’t be going at all, without your express permission.”

“Are you sure about this?” Diego says. “I mean, seeing how much shit we started by time traveling before, why would you want to go back and risk breaking everything and having to start it all over again?”

“You know, I’d thought you of all people would understand, Diego,” Five says. 

“Yeah? Where are you going?”

“London. 1992.”

Diego blinks. “You’re…”

“I want to go get Lila. Before all this starts. I want to go and get her, before Handler can.”

At once, all the bristling anger in Vanya vanishes.

“That…” Diego opens his mouth, and closes it. “Would that even work? Isn’t she into time travel too? How do you know she wouldn’t stop you? And if Lila never grows into… into what she grows into, wouldn’t that mean we never meet her, and never save her at all?”

“It’s complicated,” Five says, launching into a dense discussion of the nature of certain Commission personnel, who’d abused the privileges of agelessness, as the Handler has. Agelessness corresponds with _timelessness,_ you see; in order to freeze a person’s body at one singular snapshot in time, they must no longer have it apply to themself at all, and therefore, they must be taken through a process by which they destabilize themselves from the points in the timeline in which they exist, to such an extent that certain changes to the timeline won't affect them at all, merely sliding off their shoulders like rain. It’s a process quite similar to what Five and his family had done, when they’d threaded the needle of the universe to arrive in the future they’d changed. “You see,” Five explains, “After landing our consciousnesses in a world that is no longer ours, into bodies that had never been ours, we have become such creatures.” 

“I’m gonna need you to run that by me again, Five,” Diego says, lost. “Use smaller words next time.”

“So what does that mean?” Vanya asks, understanding enough. “We don’t _age_ anymore?”

“Obviously not. Case in point, myself. What’s happened is, if any one of us is to time travel at any later point… well. It’s kind of odd. It’s like splitting the hair of the universe. Dad always said that time travel was like… like trees, you know? You have to follow the branch, down to the twig, down to the specific leaf, to get to where you want to go, but it’s all connected to one trunk...”

“Yes,” Vanya says. “He said that you have trouble acorning.”

Five grimaces. “He did.” 

“Five,” Diego says, “Get this train back on track. Please.”

“Fine, Diego. Basically, if any one of us were to time travel, our very presence, as people who’ve sort of transcended time, would split the timeline in two. But not two halves, two mirror images. Which means, if I go to London that summer in 1992, I can get her, _before_ Handler does.” 

“Wouldn’t you have seen that though? Being that you were, uh... _there,_ at the time?”

“That’s the thing, Diego. I _wasn’t._ I did the job, and then I _left._ I didn’t see what Handler did after that; I’d already gone back to Headquarters. In fact, I didn’t even know she’d gone to the flat at all, after I left. I never knew Handler even had a kid until a few months ago, let alone having _seen_ her in person. So, if I get there, I can take Lila with me, before Handler gets her hands on her, without fucking up our current timeline. I can bring her back, and she’ll still have met us in the exact same way she would have, because technically, I’ve both saved her and not saved her.”

 _Of course, I could also kill the Handler, which I’d quite enjoy…_ Five frowns. _No, that’d be too disruptive. Too risky. Just get the girl and go._

“So what you’re saying is,” Diego says, “She’d be in two places at once.”

“Yes,” Five says, “Exactly.”

“So,” Diego says, putting it together at last. “None of us forget her. We remember her. She still attacked us. She still helped Vanya kill the Sparrows. She still almost destroyed the world. But, at the same time, she’s _with_ us, alive.”

“You’ve got it.” 

“She’ll be… what, three? Four?” 

“Yes.” 

Diego considers it. She’d get to grow up again. With them. She’d get to have those early memories of her parents, and she might not be spared the pain of losing them, but she’d get to grow up with people who love her, and live a full life as her own person. 

“Let’s do it,” he says, springing to his feet. “Let’s go, right now.” 

* * *

They don’t go. At least, not right then.

First comes Five’s attempt to restore his desecrated equation, which is a blessing in disguise, as he discovers he carried the wrong two halfway through, and at last finds a viable option.

Then, the family meeting, wherein Five discusses his ambitions, and the family weighs the possibility. Wherein, it is determined that they won’t stop with _just_ her. 

The house, after all, is so massive. It’d been built for them, but also for thirty-nine other children, who’d been turned away into the wild, snatched up by time-traveling assassins, or had never lived to have the opportunity to live in its halls. There is enough room for them all, and if one of them is getting a second chance, and a new life that will spare her of the pain she'd been subject to, then it follows that the rest must follow suit. 

Everyone agrees, unanimously and without conflict, that it simply must be done.

So begins the preparation. 

Diego and Klaus take a trip to Norway, and while Diego’s snatching the maps, Klaus has a quiet talk with the ghosts that’d drifted their way back there, to sit amid the ruins and wander, to tell them that they will be provided for, and to watch them pass on. They return with armloads of maps and files, and with a blessing, and with a particularly side-splitting story about how Diego had nearly cartwheeled down the side of a mountain trying to show off on his skis.

Allison, Ben and Luther pour over a timeline, devising which child had died when and how, and been born where. It is important to make as little a dent in the timeline as possible, to give those children who’d been spared rejection the little time with their parents that they had, and so their endeavor becomes considerably more complicated than simply sending Five to 1989 over and over again.

Five has thirty-six variations of an equation to write.

And Vanya comes to him, the night before he leaves, takes his hand into hers, and asks for one more. 

When he leaves, he starts with Lila. He owes her that much.

The process, in all, takes about a hundred days to complete. Sometimes, Five is gone for a second, sometimes a day or more; sometimes he is ready to do two in a single day, sometimes he sleeps a week between outings. Through it all, the inaugural class of the Umbrella Academy, seven strong, falls in to begin the single most important mission of their lives. 

Once done, the second class of the Umbrella Academy, thirty-nine (plus one) strong, is in session. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. Final chapter, here we are. What a ride. This fic was absolute hell to write, probably because of the nature of big climaxes. Hopefully, this was satisfactory.
> 
> There'll be one more installment, an epilogue of sorts.
> 
> Thanks to everyone for reading!
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
> 
> Coming up next: once more, we meet the Hargreeves family.


End file.
